‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ review: Still has a great hook

There’s no keeping a good killer down. If there’s one thing slasher films have taught us in the decades they’ve been hacking across our movie screens it’s that it doesn’t matter how many times you shoot ’em in the head – they’re always popping up for one more scare. Or years’ worth of more scares, even. And with the recent revival of the Scream franchise it was only a matter of time before other entries in the late ’90s slasher boom slipped into their ol’ rain slickers and got back to doing what they do best.

Enter I Know What You Did Last Summer, Do Revenge director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s fun, frisky, and diabolically silly legacy sequel to Jim Gillespie and Kevin Williamson’s identically-titled 1997 film. Exactly like the 2022 Scream “re-quel” we’re here introduced to a fresh crop of pretty young things who suddenly find themselves on an extremely recognizable killer’s chopping block. And like the Woodsboro teens, these youths must also seek out the battle-scarred survivors of the earlier franchise (our old pals Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr) to decipher whodunit, before they all find themselves fish food.

Even with its own hook, I Know What You Did Last Summer always lived in Scream‘s gigantic ghost-faced shadow, so it’s only right and honest for the new film to go ahead and embrace such xeroxed shenanigans. It’s entirely true to the spirit of the franchise. However, it does offer a new surprises.

I Know What You Did Last Summer puts a new teen gang on the hook

Despite technically being a sequel to 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer kicks things off with a first act that might have you wondering if we’re not just watching a full-on remake of the original. Gang of teens parties in the fishing village of Southport, North Carolina. Gang of teens accidentally kills somebody. Gang of teens covers it up and makes a pact to never speak of it again until gang of teens starts getting hunted down by a hook-wielding maniac with a predilection for fancy stationery. You know, the greatest hits. Same old!

In Robinson’s film, the core gang has been aged up. In their mid-twenties, these are former high school besties reuniting for the engagement party of their most esteemed (i.e. rich as hell) pals. First, we meet Ava (the extremely likeable Chase Sui Wonders from Bodies Bodies Bodies), arriving back in her haunted hometown of Southport, after a few years away. The thing is, Southport ain’t so cursed anymore. The decades since we were last here in the original film watching teenagers put on ice have been extremely good to the town. It’s now a shining jewel of the Eastern seaboard, mostly thanks to the vulturish real estate efforts of the mega-wealthy Grant Spencer (Billy Campbell). He swooped in when prices were low (due to that aforementioned teen slaughtering) and gave the place a proper glow up. (Horror movies and real life agree: real estate developers will always be the real villains.)

It’s Grant’s strapping son Teddy (Tyriq Withers, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead) who’s getting hitched — or as the banner above the party’s entrance puts it, “hooked,” wink wink — to former beauty queen and Ava’s BFF Danica (Outer Banks‘ Madelyn Cline). Add on Ava’s former flame Milo (Jonah Hauer-King, The Little Mermaid‘s Prince Eric) and everybody’s estranged townie friend Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon, Tiny Beautiful Things) who’s unexpectedly working the party. We’ve now been introduced to our new core gang, some of whom will obviously not make it out of this town alive.

This slasher requel likes to swerve when we don’t expect it

Like the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, a hit-and-run seals the fates of the film’s characters. However, this re-creation of the famous scene plays out with surprises, giving us our first taste of the smorgasbord of tricks Robinson’s got up her directorial sleeve. Her script (co-written by Sam Lansky and Leah McKendrick) is just playful enough with our expectations to keep things lively, marching to its own loony beat even while stepping through familiar tracks. It’s a remix of sorts, knowing what we want and totally giving us a lot of exactly that, but in ways weird enough to keep us guessing. Late in the film, one character might exclaim “Nostalgia’s overrated!” but the movie doesn’t skimp on it. It just tweaks it a little, enough for some fun times.

Mashable Top Stories

The fact that Robinson’s film is cribbing from Jaws just as much as it is from the ’90s slasher franchise it’s re-doing should be an indication that this ain’t your cool auntie’s same I Know What You Did Last Summer. For example, rich man Spencer’s oligarchical ways might work in the kids’ favor when it comes to covering up their vehicular manslaughter. But as their past comes back to haunt them in the form of that hook-wielding psychopath with his all-caps handwritten threats, Spencer’s desire to keep his crown jewel of a community conspiracy-free means the kids can’t trust his in-pocket police force to help. They’re too busy waving their arms saying “Nothing to see here!” to see the bodies piling up behind them.

The kids are alright in I Know What You Did Last Summer (except for that knife in their back)

It’s refreshing to see how genuinely likeable most of our main characters are in I Know What You Did Last Summer. That was mostly true in the original film as well — Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) forever! But it’s important considering how keenly focused the 1997 film was on its main foursome; screenwriter Kevin Williamson was basically delivering a version of his own Dawson’s Creek with light bloodletting. The new I Know What You Did Last Summer maintains a lot of that sense of dialed-in intimacy. It’s 100 percent keyed into who these kids are, so even when they’re being dumb, the movie celebrates them for it. Or at least empathizes. And that’s plainly nice to experience when so many of these movies can’t seem to stand their own characters.

This is especially true in Wonders and Cline’s portrayal of the relationship between Ava and Danica, best friends who never miss a chance to tell each other how much they love one another, even when the pressure of their deceitful history weighs on them. Slashers often refrain, to their detriment, from making us care too much about characters because they are, by genre’s definition, meat for the grinder. All the hacking and stabbing can stop being entertaining if we care too much about the hacked and slashed. But there is a needle to be threaded in making us root for the protagonists, and Robinson and her actors thread it well. As a result, we (whaddyaknow) find ourselves extra scared for these kids finding themselves in constant unspeakable danger. Everybody wins!

It’s the weirdness where I Know What You Did Last Summer really wins out

The thing about the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise that always made it stand enough apart from Scream and the other ’90s slashers to thrive was its weird little swerves — Anne Heche and her taxidermy farm anyone? Or what about Hewitt’s truly bizarre apocryphal story about an actual child writing and directing her infamous “What are you waiting for, huh?” moment?

Thankfully, Robinson nails that left-field whackadoo vibe as well. There are miniature subplots involving a bisexual horror podcaster (Gabbriette Bechtel) wearing covetable Helen Shivers merch, a cult-like pastor (Austin Nichols) keeping a serial-killer-ish scrapbook, and don’t even get me started on the dream sequence that drew spontaneous applause from my audience. The word “trauma” is uttered here as many times as Jamie Lee Curtis landed it in her Halloween press run, but somehow it works as a blessed, knowing laugh-line. There’s just enough winking going on to make it go down easy, leaving the heaviness of so-called “elevated horror” to the past.

Nowhere is that more evident in the return of Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. as I Know What You Did Last Summer‘s original survivors, Julie and Ray. Like Neve Campbell, Courteney Bass Cox, and David Arquette in Scream, these actors have sat with the legacy of the original film for 20 years, and jump right back into it with the perfect mix of seriousness and goofiness. Julie and Ray have plenty to teach the next generation about surviving — not just great big hooks flying at their faces, but embracing genre silliness in its purest form.

Here, Robinson’s film leans into the fun of horror legacy, playing to the strengths of the ’90s original and throwing curveballs at a new generation. It’s all a learning process: when life stabs you, you strike a pose in your designer jeans and vintage rock tee and stab it the hell back, baby.

I Know What You Did Last Summer opens in theaters July 18.